Guide to systems thinking- with Acumen Academy’s Systems Practice course
I participated in the 8-week-long systems practice course by Acumen Academy. This is a rendition of the course through my experience, to explain the structure of the course and its effectiveness as a System Thinking learner.
A system is a whole that cannot be divided into independent parts…The performance of a system doesn’t depend on how the parts perform taken separately, it depends on how they perform together — how they interact, not on how they act, taken separately. Therefore, when you improve the performance of a part of a system taken separately, you can destroy the system.
— Russell J Ackoff
🚀 Teammate — Giovanni Caruso
The mycorrhizal network is an intricately organised, complex, unbelievably connected network of trees in the woods where one tree communicates with another through an underground fungal puzzle. Here each one has a role to play, to ensure that its group survives and thrives. Through the “wood-wide-web” resources such as nutrients, water and sugar are shared back and forth.
Much like the mycorrhizal network, our social network is also a complex, convoluted and confusing but delicately balanced system. Each entity, institution, structure, stakeholder and resource has its role to play, and is deeply intertwined and interconnected with another. To study and truly understand the effect that one variable has — we simply cannot extract it from its network and observe it in isolation. But, study the relationships and the interdependencies that maintain the system, and the next, and the next, and the next.
All of our world’s wicked problems have these complex relationships with causes and effects, that are loops and cyclic, and systems thinking is a practice that enables us to break away from linearities and adopt a holistic, circular way of thinking.
The course itself was structured into 7 modules, and in each module, we covered considerable ground on starting to understand what systems are and eventually built our own systems map.
Understanding the challenge or the system we wanted to build — Module One
Since we were not working on any social projects or a part of any social organisation we decided to select a topic that was deeply affecting the socio-political environment globally. We are very well aware of the insidious nature of misinformation and how its prevalence has a deep impact on society as a whole. What can quite often start with a small ‘misalignment’ can cascade to mistrust in governments, dismantle fundamentals of democracy, discredit science, diminish credibility, proliferate biases and, propagate extreme ideologies.
🚨 Note: By no means are we trying to fix the problem of misinformation or suggesting possible solutions. Instead, our objective was to look at it as a sprawling network (system) and to dig deeper into each of the nodes to slowly build up our knowledge on the subject.
These are barely gracing the surface when we think about the nuances of this issue. Just as we were exploring this topic further within our respective countries (Italy & India), is when a certain someone decided to carry out a “special military operation” in another country. We watched the propaganda machines growl and grunt into existence, actively churning out misinformation, disinformation and mal-information. What ensued was the disruption of the stability of communities.
We mapped this issue over a complexity spectrum chart; The level of understanding we had about the topic, the environments it had an impact on, the engagement of this issue within a broader environment and our goal to understand the different elements within the system.
Throughout the course, we followed three illustrious projects, three elaborate systems from their conception, to their mapping. These system projects not only acted as a step-by-step guide but also kept us grounded. They pretty much drill in the message that, system mapping does not have a linear construct. Though we can define a beginning, a middle and an end — it is no easy feat and it is indeed a long and windy road to reach the (hypothetical) end.
The research phase never really ended. Every week we would find new information or unearth something we previously missed. We’d return to the (miro) board and add it to the map. Systems by their very nature do not “end” or culminate in any particular state, and so the process of designing for one would be unceasing.
Zoom out — Module Two
As mentioned before, systems are perpetual, intangible machines. So it would be impossible to clearly define an end-point for it. But if we look at any physical or digital product or service, we always define an “ideal state”. We explore and understand a service as it is now and map the way we want it to be. The roadmap or the blueprint helps us identify the gaps in a service and where we can intervene for the best outcomes.
What would be the ideal or aspirational state for the system?
“The system, to a large extent, causes its won behavior! An outside event may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system, is likely to produce a different result.”
— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in systems: A primer
Instead of a concrete end-point, we have to constantly work towards a healthier system. A healthy system can evolve to continuously improve itself. This ‘state’ would serve as a navigational tool as the system adapts and impacts over time. During the course, we referred to this aspirational state as the “Guiding star”.
⭐️ A system in which all players consuming from and contributing to the information in the mediascape is credible, accessible, informed, and accountable.
What were the significant near-term goals?
And for that reason, we can identify several near-term goals which would act as important milestones in its evolution. These near-term goals are referred to as “Near stars”.
A system that trains its users to:
- Increase in media literacy and critical reading skills
- Decrease the risk of polarization
- Keep exchange of opinions away from the battlefield met over (no enemies, promote more dialogue)
- Create awareness about and support platforms fighting misinformation and,
- Subsequently create more understanding of misinformation itself.
As we start to map the system, we must understand its constituents, its impact & influence, and its relationships with other elements. We can use a “Framing question” to maintain focus and our understanding of the system and identify key aspects to analyse to formulate objectives. And so we ask :
💭 Why are the current news systems failing to prevent the spread of misinformation?
Zoom in- Module Three
“The present hyperinflation and proliferation of things are precisely a sign of an increasing indifference towards things. We are obsessed not with things but with information and data. We now consume more information than things.”
— Byung-chul Han, Non-things
Trust in legacy institutions has been crumbling for years, and this power imbalance has placed a lot of metaphorical weaponry in the hands of social media giants, which then cascades down to the hands of the mass population armed with smartphones. While this trust faded, radicalism and activism came into focus. We are coaxed and coerced to extremist views by propagandists and lobbyists and we are fed polarising content, thoughts, people, politics and, just a way of being.
In the past decade, trust inequality has been the most consequential development in understanding what’s happened to public confidence in politics and business, media and non-government organisations. While trust in institutions among the informed public — aka the well-educated and the wealthy — has been rising and is now at an all-time high, trust in those same institutions among the mass population has flatlined.
— Studies from Edelman.
The insidious webs of social media & our social networks, trap us within echo chambers where it’s hard to hear opposing voices, even if we wanted to.
In a world controlled by algorithms, the human being gradually loses the power to act, loses autonomy. The human being confronts a world that resists efforts at comprehension. He or she obeys algorithmic decisions, which lack transparency.Algorithms become black boxes. The world is lost in the deep layers of neuronal networks to which human beings have no access.
— Byung-chul Han, Non-things
Powerful as it may be, this media is addictive, it promotes homophily and biases, it divides and exploits, it fractures community and rationality, it betrays individualism and critical thinking, it dismantles the foundations of democracy and it distorts our reality. And how? On the bedrock of misinformation.
This was a theme (amongst many) that we identified within this system, and these themes are self-sustaining cycles composed of inhibitors and enablers. Inhibitors are forces that proliferate negative behaviours within the system whereas enablers promote positive behaviours. We identified and listed various factors as inhibitors and enablers, which we further clustered together to create themes. These themes were then distinguished as “primary” & “secondary”.
The predominant themes we classified as “primary” were the democratisation of AI & its side effects such as filter bubbles. This showed a direct correlation between the lack of trust in legacy institutions and the eventual exploitation of beliefs. The level of education and human cognition played important roles, especially to facilitate the transfer of knowledge about new information, products, and technologies created by others. Each of these themes was further analysed to understand the causes and effects using a combination of the iceberg model & SAT (structural, attitudinal, transactional) analysis.
Upstream causes
(Things leading to the theme)
Structural causes: Places, spaces, structures, institutions, Government, policy, legislation, rules, Economics, politics, education, science, technology
Attitudinal causes: Society, community, culture, country
Behavioural or Transactional causes: People, behaviour, faith, Me & you
Downstream effects
(things the theme causes)
Structural effects: Identity politics, dysfunctional democracy, radicalism, subsumed & censored opposition, communal reinforcement
Attitudinal effects: Homophily, confirmation bias, denial of social or legal conventions, anti-systemic politics, groupthink, narrow media consumption, failure to assess outcomes, risks
Behavioural or Transactional effects: Misuse of power, position & influence, vulnerability to propagandists & lobbyists, questioning credibility & faith in institutions, professionals or experts, distorted sense of reality
Zoom out — Module Four
In this module, we approach the event horizon of the system but haven’t been sucked into the black hole quite yet. In week 4 we started to build causal loops — to explore the interrelationship between all the forces, the causes & the effects, and how it feeds back into itself. Once we’d mapped the causal loops, we then stepped back to sense what was at the crux of the system i.e. the deep structure.
By now we knew the main themes of misinformation in the mediascape that we wanted to focus on. The filter bubbles spawned by big tech and social media (1), backed by very democratised but questionable, unethical and, biased algorithms (2) that slowly chip away at the human cognition & ability to be rational, sceptical, critical thinkers (3), leaving us exposed and vulnerable to tyrannical social predators (4) who exploit, extort and oppress until we are left with broken systems and institutions (5) that stymie education, growth & progression (6).
Crawling down the rabbit hole of misinformation, we can also establish close links between policy and regulation of media houses (or its lack thereof) with social media platforms. The revenue and advertisement models are so heavily skewed in favour of social media outlets that engagement or time spent on a platform has become the new metric of success than the veracity of the news itself.
News quickly became a commodity to be sensationalised and baited for “clicks”, so much so that, there no longer exists a hierarchy between credible & non-credible sources. Economical and political incentives drive and often override professional journalism.
The sheer quantity of information from multitudes of sources that is within our reach threatens to overwhelm even the sane and stable.
“We are literally becoming intoxicated with communication. Libidinal energy is redirected from things to non-things. The result is info-mania. We are all info-maniacs now…”
— Daniel Steuer & Byung-chul Han, Non-things
Despite this information overload, we still fail minority communities. Credible sources of news available to them in their native languages are few and far between. They are left to scramble to the next best thing, which is the furthest away from being the next best anything. But we have to give credit where credit is due — Social media giants have taken active measures to curb the spread of misinformation. Twitter and Meta have taken various measures to fact-check — their effectiveness has yet to be proven though.
But here’s the catch, its reach is only for English speakers. All the while, the skullduggery impacting minority communities slip right through. This brings us to yet another point — Information needs to be accessible. If what is being said on national media is outside the scope of one’s existence or understanding, then they will turn to other sources that speak their language or address things that matter to them. Why listen to a hysterical scientist explain all the causes and preventive measures for Covid when the 5-step cure had been circulating on WhatsApp all along?
When we took a closer look at the loops, we were able to determine the relationship between the factors and the downstream effect that one has on another. Which we then categorised and labelled as virtuous (things are getting better and better), vicious (things getting worse and worse), stabilising(keeping things from getting worse) or stagnating (keeping things from getting better) loops. This differentiation was important in later modules to identify important leverage points ( points of intervention within the mapped system that could be modified or worked upon to trigger positive changes within it).
Zoom out - Module Five
What is the dominant behaviour of the system and how does it work?
Three to four important themes are prioritised, reorganised, and connected to build a compelling story that can explain the current state of the system. This story would serve as a ‘powerful’ means to anchor all the ‘functional’ themes and ground the ‘real’ evidence collected for all the loop.
Mapping the system
To understand the process of mapping a system or building an MVP man, other important loops or stories are iteratively added to the deep structure, The key focus here was to best represent the evidence collected, while closing any of the gaps or assumptions made, to ensure that everything on the map was a part of a closed loop.
The lack of trust in legacy institutions serves as an anchor in the system. It spurred a lot of public concern which in turn left them vulnerable to exploitation. Politicians have played this card time and time again. Not to name names, but we’ve seen the consequences of an open declaration that challenged anything and everything disclosed to the public as being “fake”, “unjust” and “oppressive”. Sowing the seeds of doubt starts to dismantle the strong foundations built by legacy institutions over decades. The source of information no longer matters and the ability to decipher truths from non-truths crashes further.
As a counter, we see the rise of activism to challenge the challengers. It is not only a means to question institutions, but also for institutions to get answers from each other. However, we might miss the underlying propagandas. What might come across as an aggregation of common opinions rooted in society, might be a facade that hides corporations or governing bodies pulling the strings and pushing agendas with end-to-end encryptions. This is a reactionary loop to a loop that further exacerbates it, an underlying structure or a system archetype called “fixes that fail”.
🚨 Note: We did not address system archetypes in this course. System archetypes are repetitive underlying structural patterns in a system that serve as templates for reference and allow us to visualise a map in loops than as individual factors.
The narrative
The vision was to create a system in which all players consuming from and contributing to the information in the mediascape are credible, accessible, informed, and accountable. For this reason, our near-star goals were to create awareness about misinformation and its impact and increase media literacy and critical reading skills. We can encourage the population to keep the exchange of opinions away from the battlefield, consequently decreasing the risk of polarization.
Framing question: To gain a deeper understanding of the pervasiveness of misinformation we asked ourselves why the current news systems were failing to prevent the spread of misinformation.
How did we listen to the system? We started by looking at the source of misinformation, how it proliferates and why. Divide into major factors. Digital platform domination and immense non-transparent power & influence have led to “digital levelling” or “flattening of the hierarchy of news which has removed the differences between trusted sources and ones that are not credible. The meteoric rise of misinformation has prompted social media giants to set up fact-checkers to combat it.
By feeding into fear, communal disparities and other tactics that are detrimental to the societal structure, Governments can manipulate the general public. Furthermore, at the societal or individual level, lack of education is leaving them vulnerable to this coercion. Homophily and functional illiteracy in turn enable them to fall prey to bipartisan polity, reject science and lose faith in fundamental institutions.
The core story: Deepening scepticism and mistrust in traditional media is turning communities towards social media platforms and alternatives — in a quest for content that is easy to digest, jargon-free, and tailored to real-people problems.
As homophily percolates people have lost the richness of different points of view in conjunction with a decrease in strategic abilities such as critical thinking and functional literacy. This vicious scenario makes communities vulnerable to third-parties agendas and reinforces their low trust in legacy institutions.
The level of trust in traditional institutions impacted the level of trust in traditional or legacy media. Quality & diversity of the media diet, homophily, risk of segregation and polarisation, risk of exposition to ideological philosophies. And it was closely tied to the level of education within a community or the country.
Insights & leverage points — Modules Six & Seven
The last two modules of the course were focused on gathering useful objective insights on the MVP map (from third parties), understanding and evaluating the gaps within the map (and the story) to be filled, and finally finding important leverage points within the system to catalyze systems change.
Insights from the field
Through discussion, we gathered that -
- We could build a more compelling narrative by paraphrasing and even reorganising the connections between the core factors
- Other stakeholders such as journalists and or politicians, who are deeply entrenched in the system would have a more nuanced understanding of the factors at play, more so than a regular consumer of the mediascape
- We identified the bigger gaps in the map, where we had failed to include the other factors such as access to platforms on the mediascape, and more importantly — the scale, the global nature of this issue and its complexity creates multiple narratives that hold in different parts of the world.
“The mediascape has evolved into a misinformation machine and the fundamentals of good and ethical journalism had fallen prey to bigotry, power yielding Governments, influencers and foreign entities.”
— The anonymous reviewer
How can this pattern be undone?
By identifying leverage points or areas of impact, and strategically manipulating factors that can be absorbed into the system. This would then go on to create a chain reaction that can permeate through the system. For this, we can carefully observe each factor in a relationship with the others that have the potential to amplify any positive change.
We can start by determining factors that may be frozen (to be avoided), is a mixed bag (there are positive and negative changes concurrently), have the potential to change and create ripple effects (high number of possible & potential positive changes), and those that could be considered bright spots.
From insights to action
🎯
The system strategy
Leverage point #1: The underlying dynamic for the majority of the factors boils down to human perception, responses and biases. These biases in turn affect the mediascape — its contributors and consumers. The focus should be on improving the critical thinking skills of individuals in a community to overcome implicit biases and be rational thinkers.
Leverage point #2: The aim is to use the same tools that are contributing to the problem, with a mix of ad-hoc education format and social media campaigns on platforms such as Instagram or youtube to reach the troubled audience exactly where they consume news and create community — it is a way to reduce separations.
Leverage point #3: One further initiative to reducing polarisation and mistrust could be the creation of new formats and platforms in a collaborative environment (a form of plural agency and empowerment).
🔮
Let’s not forget about minority communities — Increasing access to media platforms and information could help reduce misinformation spreading within minority communities and boost trust in the local media house. This accessibility could be mediated and supported by popular digital platforms — its primary focus should be on delivering the most valuable content to users rather than pushing for the most “popular” ones.
The outreach — These policies also need to ensure that the actions taken by big tech to curb misinformation across their platforms not only cover English-speaking communities but also minority communities and, regional languages where misinformation is prevalent
Policies for Big tech — Stringent policies by policymakers should be used to regulate these dominating digital platforms. This could ensure that revenue models are not skewed in the favour of those who are looking to exploit communities with sensationalisation of news or making false claims
Changing our relationship with media — Access to robust local news (in regional languages within minority communities), media houses and journalism would establish healthy communication with the general public and impact their relationship & trust in the media.
♟
Introducing new stakeholders into the map
We can bring numerous other stakeholders & practices into the system to create positive change within the system
Startups fighting for good — Emulating and sponsoring startups tackling misinformation, as many of them are not only fighting misinformation amongst English-speaking countries but also minority communities.
Science and scientists — Scientists and experts are crucial to building informed communities. Platforms and influencers can rally behind bridging the gaps between experts, scientists and the general public by acting as mediators to make information more comprehensible and accessible
(Good) Influencers — Establishing “News literacy week” amplifying the voices of role models and their programs across different platforms to target all age groups.
🍎
Final thoughts on the course:
The course was challenging and thought-provoking. The biggest takeaways:
- Problems or issues cannot be isolated and solved. In the bigger picture, there are complex interrelations and interdependencies between several factors that would have been taken into account before proposing “fixes”
- The map is a visualisation of structures, causal loops, and actors, and it is not worked upon with the goal of gaining full resolution or as the output of the study.
- The map serves to tell the story of the system. The narrative should be effective through each iteration of it, and it is crucial for the alignment of all stakeholders to strategize operations.
- Systems are complex and have several moving parts, so the definition of a single solution or a series of solutions is not the culmination of designing for it. But rather, the definition of a healthier state for the system and doing the groundwork to achieve that state. Hence the system is not “fixed” — it is improved.
- By thinking in systems we can broaden the scope of our understanding which would, in turn, inform the decision-making process to be grounded and based on actual evidence or feedback provided by the system.
- By gathering intricate knowledge about a system we can ensure that we are trying to tackle the right issues which would have the required impact or outcome.
- How do we find these specific “issues to solve”? With the thorough observation of patterns of behaviour within it. These patterns are called system archetypes (this topic was not covered by the course) and help in identifying leverage points to act on the system.
We will use systems practices as a form of agency and empowerment. Cheers!
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Resources
Here’s a whole bunch of other resources that could be helpful to learn more about systems thinking & the topic of misinformation.
Books:
Byung-Chul Han, Non-things: Upheaval in the lifeworld, Polity, 2022.
Donella H Meadows & Diana Wright, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008.
David Peter Stroh, Systems Thinking For Social Change: A Practical Guide to Solving Complex Problems, Avoiding Unintended Consequences, and Achieving Lasting Results, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015.
Ben Ramalingam, Aid on the Edge of Chaos, Oxford University Press, 2013.
Rob Ricigliano, Making Peace Last: A Toolbox for Sustainable Peacebuilding, Routledge, 2012.
From the course:
Articles on systemsthinker
David Peter Stroh and Kathleen Zurcher, A systems approach to increasing the impact of Grantmaking, Society for Organizational Learning, 2012
Kimberly Bowman et. Al, Toward Principles for Enhancing the Resilience of Ecosystem Services, Annual Reviews, Nov 2012.
Daniel Kim and Colleen Lannon, Systems Archetypes at a Glance, Systems archetypes I- Diagnosing system issues and designing high-leverage interventions, Pegasus communications.
Joe Hsueh, The art and science of systems change, The Guardian, April 29, 2014
Jo Confino, The art of systems thinking in driving sustainable transformation, The Guardian, Oct 15, 2012.
Harry Jones, Complexity 101: Behind the hype, what do we actually know? , ODI: Think change
Alex Gray, The 10 skills you need to survive in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum, Jan 19, 2016.
Susan Misra and Jamaica Maxwell, Three Keys to Unlocking Systems-Level Change, Standford Social Innovation Review, April 29, 2016.
Articles:
Andrew Hutchinson, Twitter Adds New Prompts to Alert Users Before Sharing Any Tweet Flagged for Misinformation, Social Media Today, Oct 16, 2020.
Andrew Hutchinson, Facebook Tests New Warning Prompts to Stop Users Sharing Articles They Haven’t Read, Social Media Today, May 10, 2021.
Adam Mosseri,Working to stop misinformation & false news, Meta, April 7, 2017
Helen Lee Bouygues, The real solution to fake news, Reboot.
Gabriele Contessa, The reasons for science scepticism can be complex and founded on real concerns, The Conversation, Jan 4, 2022.
Richard Chartrand, The rising scepticism of science and how we can solve it., 3M Canada, Feb 9, 2022.
Studies :
Mark Ledwich & Anna Zaitsev, Algorithm extremism: Examining YouTube’s Rabbit Hole of Radicalization, Dec 24, 2019.
Richard Edelman, The New Trust Compact, Edelman.
Catherine Grant, The contribution of education to economic growth, K4D research, March 3, 2017.
